The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit

by Eleanor Fitzsimons

Ernest Belfort Bax, who had left the SDF to establish the Socialist League with William Morris, left a tongue-in-cheek account of the foundation of the Fellowship of the New Life:

  Early in the year 1883 a group of nice young persons of both sexes met together in a London drawing room and resolved to form a Society for mutual aid in soaring, whither none of them exactly could say—but soar they meant to, above the lusts of the flesh into certain unspecified regions of plain living and high thinking.16

  Since Chubb considered Hubert to be “morally promising,” he invited him to a second meeting, which was convened a fortnight later. Chubb was rather taken aback when his guest inquired if he should attend wearing evening dress. Hubert too fell under Davidson’s spell, and described him as “a spiritual tonic.” In The Faith I Hold he explained: “one came away from an evening’s talk with him with a sharpened appetite for ideas. I think it was he who rid me of the last clinging mud of the pessimist bog.”17

  Hubert was in the chair on December 7, 1883, when the Fellowship ratified a draft constitution designed to foster “the cultivation of a perfect character in each and all.” A rather vague guiding principle promised “the subordination of material things to spiritual things.” This was to be achieved by means of four equally vague actions:

  1. The supplanting of the spirit of self-seeking by that unselfish regard for the general good.

  2. Simplicity of living.

  3. The highest and completest education of the young.

  4. Introduction as far as possible of manual labour in conjunction with intellectual pursuits.

  Before long ideological cracks began to appear, and Hubert was branded the catalyst. As Belfort Bax put it:

  The leader of the malcontents was Hubert Bland, who, having grave doubts as to the practical utility of plain living and high thinking, proposed that the Society should adopt new lines, and make a serious attempt to tackle social problems upon the Socialist basis, then first becoming generally known in this country.18

  An anonymous note penciled into the margin of the Fellowship Minute Book described Hubert as “the materialistic cuckoo who was to affect the dispersal of the Davidsonian brood of spiritual singing birds.” Differences came to a head at a meeting Hubert chaired on January 4, 1884, which Edith attended. “Cuckoo hatched” noted the anonymous penciler.19

  One faction, led by Chubb, who would soon join Davidson in America, believed that the spiritual must take primacy over the political. They advocated the establishment of a utopian community in the Lake District, although this plan was scaled back to an experimental commune operating out of a house in London. Hubert led the rival faction, supported by Pease and Podmore. This formed the nucleus of what became the Fabian Society, which was named, at Podmore’s suggestion, after the Roman general Fabius Cunctator, whose victorious tactics against Hannibal were lauded as forthright, pragmatic, and perfectly timed. This group insisted that economics and the equitable distribution of wealth must take primacy. As Belfort Bax put it, the Fabian Society “relegated ‘plain living and high thinking’ to the position of a purely private matter.”20

  In The Wouldbegoods Dora Bastable declares: “when people want to do good things they always make a society.” The aim of the Bastable children’s society is “nobleness and goodness, and great and unselfish deeds.” They are endearingly idealistic: “We wish to spread our wings and rise above the kind of interesting things that you ought not to do, but to do kindnesses to all, however low and mean,” they announce. They write the rules of the “NEW SOCIETY FOR BEING GOOD IN” in their minute book:

  1. Every member is to be as good as possible.

  2. There is to be no more jaw [talk] than necessary about being good. (Oswald and Dicky put that rule in.)

  3. No day must pass without our doing some kind action to a suffering fellow-creature.

  4. We are to meet every day, or as often as we like.

  5. We are to do good to people we don’t like as often as we can.

  6. No one is to leave the Society without the consent of all the rest of us.

  7. The Society is to be kept a profound secret from all the world except us.

  8. The name of our Society is . . . the Society of the Wouldbegoods.

  Although considerably more worldly than the Fellowship of the New Life, the Fabian Society’s ambitions were just as lofty. Their stated aim was the reconstruction of society “in such manner as to secure the general welfare and happiness.”21

  Edith was an enthusiastic Fabian from the start: “the talks after the Fabian meetings are very jolly,” she told Ada Breakell. “I do think the Fabians are quite the nicest set of people I ever knew.”22 They met on alternate Fridays to discuss “the Condition of England and what might be done about it.”23 Pease admitted, with admirable frankness:

  At this stage our chief characteristic was a lack of self-confidence unusual amongst revolutionaries. We had with considerable courage set out to reconstruct society, and we frankly confessed that we did not know how to go about it.24

  Yet when George Bernard Shaw joined them in 1885, he observed:

  If you consider that we are all persons of strong individuality and very diverse temperaments, and take along with that the fact that no one of us is strong enough to impose his will on the rest, or weak enough to allow himself to be overridden, you will . . . allow me to claim our escape from the quarrels which have rent asunder both the Federation and the League as a proof that our methods do stand the test of experience in the matter of keeping our forces together.25

  All was not as harmonious as it appeared. Pease, who regarded Hubert as “always something of a critic . . . a Tory by instinct wherever he was not a Socialist,” thought that, “whilst thoroughly united with the others for all purposes of the Society, he [Hubert] lived the rest of his life apart.”26

  In Fabianism and Culture, Ian Britain wrote of “an air of comfort, refinement and charm about Fabian Society gatherings which a body like the Socialist League could never match.”27 Pease believed that a perception of privilege attracted opprobrium:

  We used to be plentifully sneered at as fops and arm-chair Socialists for our attention to these details; but I think it was by no means the least of our merits that we always, as far as our means permitted, tried to make our printed documents as handsome as possible, and did our best to destroy the association between revolutionary literature and slovenly printing on paper that is nasty without being cheap. One effect of this was that we were supposed to be much richer than we really were, because we generally got better value and a finer show for our money than the other Socialist societies.28

  In March 1886 an entertaining, though far from even-handed, article was published in the Morning Star. Its author, Arnold White, journalist and unsuccessful Liberal candidate, characterized the Fabians as “eloquent in theory but unpractical in method.”29 He described a Fabian Society meeting he had attended at the invitation of Edward Pease. It was held, he insisted, in a “well-appointed and fashionably-situated mansion,” which was representative of the “residential pretentiousness affected by other prominent members of the Socialistic movement in London in its air of well-to-do ease and comfort.” Warming to his theme, he described how “more than one Fabian arrived and went in his own carriage,” and how guests were greeted by a “blue-coated, gold-buttoned manservant.” On entering, he observed that:

  [A] “dim religious light” from the duplex burner of a pink shaded lamp bathed the session chamber of the Fabians in a ruddy and mysterious softness. Standing on the threshold of the room one felt instinctively that he was entering into a society of dreamers—into the charmed realms of those whose theories are the theories of the etherealist.30

  White portrayed Hubert in unflattering terms: “Difference of opinion, said the hon. treasurer in his shrill, excitable way, is our raison d’être.”

  The Fabian Society was riven by ideological differences, which Edith outlined succinctly in a letter to Ada:

  There
are two distinct elements in the F.S. The practical and the visionary—the first being much the strongest—but a perpetual warfare goes on between the parties wh. gives to the Fabian an excitement wh. it might otherwise lack. We belong—needs say—to the practical party, and so do most of our most intimate friends—Stapleton, Keddell, Watts, Estcourt.

  Matters came to a head on September 17, 1886, when Hubert seconded a motion proposed by prominent Fabian Annie Besant at a meeting convened in Anderton’s Hotel on Fleet Street:

  That it is advisable the Socialists should organise themselves as a political party for the purposes of transferring into the hands of the whole working community full control over the soil and the means of production and distribution of wealth.31

  The ensuing debate was so robust that it was noted in the minutes:

  Subsequently to the meeting, the secretary received notice from the manager of Anderton’s Hotel that the Society could not be accommodated there for any further meetings.32

  Besant’s skills as an orator were extraordinary. As one commentator observed, “she speaks as correctly as she writes and her voice is as melodious as a silver bell.”33 White, in his article for the Morning Star, admired how she had “soared into one of the most eloquent passages of the evening,” and described how “other lady members” were “crouching at her feet.” He added that “she might have been a queen holding court in the midst of her maids of honour.”

  Short and delicate of feature, she was eleven years older than Edith and had also lost her father in early childhood. Unable to support her, her mother had placed her in the care of Ellen Marryat, an Evangelical spinster who raised her to be grave and overly religious. At the age of twenty she married evangelical Anglican clergyman Frank Besant, who was attracted by her religious fervor. They had two children by the time Annie began to question her faith. She obtained a legal separation in 1873 and moved back in with her mother, bringing her daughter with her; she was not granted custody of her son.

  Increasingly radicalized, Besant joined the National Secular Society, established by charismatic, militant atheist Charles Bradlaugh, who Edith “loathed” since she considered him “innately bestial.”34 Besant resolved to give herself wholly “to propagandist work, as a Freethinker and a Social Reformer.” She would, she declared, “use my tongue as well as my pen in the struggle.”35 She coedited the National Reformer and worked with Bradlaugh on republishing Charles Knowlton’s sexually explicit The Fruits of Philosophy, or The Private Companion of Young Married People. They were tried for obscenity as a result, and, although they were acquitted, Besant lost custody of her daughter.

  As a campaigner, Besant radiated pure energy. It was said of her, “she has held so many opinions in her time that everybody is bound to find himself in agreement with some of them.” That same commentator claimed that she “combined the crusader’s zeal with the journalist’s alert outlook for new ‘stunts.’”36 In 1883 she founded Our Corner, a six-penny monthly journal featuring a column titled “Fabian Society and Socialist Notes.” She commissioned articles from prominent Fabians, including Edith and Hubert, whose writing she admired. Commenting on Something Wrong, which they wrote for the Weekly Dispatch under their “nom de guerre Fabian Bland,” she noted that it opened “vigorously,” adding, “I hear it will deal with the Socialist agitation, and that some of the best-known leaders therein will be sketched as the story proceeds.” She singled Edith out: “By the way E. Nesbit’s short poems in the same paper are quite above ordinary newspaper verse, and sometimes deserve higher praise.”37

  Besant claimed that she had joined the Fabian Society because she found it “less hotly antagonistic to the Radicals than the other two Socialist societies.” She listed the members she admired most:

  Sidney Webb, G. Bernard Shaw, Hubert and Mrs Bland, Graham Wallas—these were some of those who gave time, thought, incessant work to the popularising of Socialist thought, the spreading of sound economics, the effort to turn the workers’ energy toward social rather than mere political thought.38

  Before long Besant was appointed to the Executive and worked closely with Hubert on several campaigns. When both stood as Progressive candidates in the School Board elections of November 1888, she was successful but he was not. When trade unionist Clementina Black had delivered a speech on female labor at a Fabian Society meeting in June of that year, she had outlined the appalling pay and conditions endured by women working at the Bryant and May match factory. Besant was horrified. Her article “White Slavery in London” helped prompt a strike, and Hubert, along with several fellow Fabians, joined the campaign. George Bernard Shaw noted in his diary: “Met Mrs Besant and Bland at Cannon Street Station to bring down the strike money to the Bryant and May girls.”39 Edith sympathized too. In The House of Arden, Richard refuses to return to modern-day London because “they make people work fourteen hours a day for nine shillings a week, so that they never have enough to eat or wear, and no time to sleep or be happy in.”40 Annie Besant was a wonderful asset to the Fabian Society, but her attention was diverted when she met the theosophist Madame Blavatsky in 1890. Pease crossed her name off the Fabian list with a red pen and wrote “gone to Theosophy” beside it.

  Edith’s letters to Ada are delightfully revealing when it comes to her opinions on her fellow Fabians. She liked Pease “very much” because he was “always smiling” and had “the cheerful serenity and self-containedness common to the sect [Quakers].” Although she thought J. Glode Stapleton “the nicest” of the Fabians, she found his excessive spiritualism tiresome and declared:

  He has given up Christianity on insufficient grounds, I think and being unable to face the outer darkness and desolation of materialism has taken refuge in Spiritualism—and this is always cropping up in his talk in a most aggravating way.41

  She added, somewhat mischievously, that he was “a man of wide reading and an extremely subtle mind—and can always see the negative of every positive.”

  Edith could not resist commenting on the appearance of some of the men. Although she conceded that Sidney Webb, a leading light in the movement, was “no fool . . . in fact an absolute master of political economy,” she remarked rather spitefully that “a face like a fat billy goat and a wild profusion of red spots do not combine to give him an attractive appearance.” She decided that Harold Cox, future Liberal MP for Preston, had “a crooked face,” while Walter Coffin had a “dark face” that she found “inscrutable.” She thought Sydney Olivier, who was later appointed Governor of Jamaica and Secretary of State for India in the first government of Ramsay MacDonald, a “very nice looking young man with a romantic name.”* At one Fabian gathering, held at her home, she noticed that the sleeve of his smoking jacket was hanging loose, and she repaired it for him without fuss. Turning her attention to Thomas Bolas and W. K. Burton, two “working men” who had written The Practical Socialist, she described them as “a rather funny sort of Siamese twins.”

  When it came to the women, Edith could be waspish. She regarded Charlotte Wilson as a rival and described her, rather disingenuously, as a “Girton girl” who was “the life and soul of the executive council.” In fact Wilson, a surgeon’s daughter, had studied at Newnham College. “Cambridge was the porch through which I entered the world,” she told Shaw.42 Yet she appeared disillusioned and dissatisfied with the orthodox economic theory she had studied there. In a letter to Ada, Edith insisted she was “trying very hard not to dislike” Wilson, but complained:

  She is sometimes horribly rude, and will never speak to a woman if she can get a man to talk to. I don’t mean she is a flirt—she isn’t, but I suppose women are not clever enough for her to talk to.43

  She was out of step with others, as Wilson was enormously popular among Fabian Society members. In “Select Socialists,” Margaret Mary Dilke, prominent suffrage campaigner and widow of radical Liberal Ashton Dilke, MP, wrote:

  Charlotte Wilson is a splendid worker, the ready champion of every neglected cause, and one of
the few people who really practise what they preach in every-day life. She and her husband live in a workman’s cottage out at Hampstead, keeping no servant, and indulging in no luxuries; all the remainder of their income is devoted to the cause.44

  Edith was scathing about Wilson’s decision to leave her “very charming house at Hampstead,” which had been paid for out of “what she tersely terms the ‘wages of iniquity.’” She thought Arthur Wilson, her stockbroker husband, a “very nice and a perfect gentleman.” She described their new home, Wyldes Farmhouse in Hampstead Heath, as “a quite little cottage where she means to keep herself by keeping fowls!” Later she admitted it was “a charming and quite idyllic little farm,” though she sneered at the “idealised farm kitchen, where of course no cooking is done.”45 Wilson is caricatured as Mrs. Coburn in Something Wrong.

  Ironically, Edith had much in common with Charlotte Wilson. Margaret Dilke noted a “curious family resemblance between the Fabian ladies” and explained “they mostly affect aesthetic garments; they cut their hair short, and at their meetings they all take their hats off.” Of Charlotte Wilson, she wrote:

  Mrs Wilson walked into the hall dressed in a long, straight ulster coat; she sat down in front of me, flung her large floppy hat on the seat, ran her fingers through her short black hair, and settled down to the debate with rapt attention. In spite of the manliness of her movement, there was something distinctly attractive in the pale delicate face and large brown eyes with their absorbed intense expression.46

  In 1884 Wilson established the Karl Marx Club, a radical political study group that met fortnightly to study Marxist and anarchist theory and was later renamed the Hampstead Historic Club. Edith attended several of what Sidney Webb called “Mrs Wilson’s economic tea parties.” Edward Pease, who described them as “the most delightful of their social gatherings,” insisted these gatherings “had much to do with settling the Fabian attitude toward Marxian economics and historical theory.”47